Conference News: What I learned this week – November 9, 2018

Living on the Edge: In January the BroadGroup will expand their Edge Conference franchise further with Edge Europe. While the group previously held an Edge event as part of their Datacloud flagship event in Monaco, Edge Europe will be a standalone conference taking place in Amsterdam from 30 – 31 January 2019. Topics that may be covered include: Defining the Edge and the Impact on the Data Center; Exploring Standards at the Edge; and Infrastructure Requirements and Responsibilities.

Get to the Point: “Dull talks at conferences can feel interminable. Or could it be that they really do go on for longer?” begins an article in Nature. While anyone who has suffered through a long-winded conference speaker has likely asked a similar question, Professor Robert M. Ewers of the Imperial College London decided to take it to the next level by formally researching the phenomenon. His findings? “For every 70 seconds that a speaker droned on, the odds that their talk had been boring doubled.” Professor Ewers then goes on to make an actionable recommendation: “To avoid banality, speakers should introduce their objectives early on and focus on pertinent information. They should avoid trite explanations, repetition, getting bogged down by irrelevant minutiae and passing off common knowledge as fresh insight.” We concur.

NASSCOM Name Change: NASSCOM’s flagship event, called the India Leadership Forum has been a successful conference for 26-years. So why have the conference organizers decided to rebrand and rename the forum in 2019 to NASSCOM Technology & Leadership (NTLF), where “T” (Technology) replaces “I”?  This is something that the conference team considered as they were wrapping up their World Congress on Information Technology (WCIT), which had strong attendance and a very engaged audience. They realized that almost every company is now a tech company in some way. “Technology is at the heart of businesses today and is reshaping strategy, culture, jobs, policy and everything we do. NTLF will create a platform which brings together technology and leaders to not only talk about tech but the ‘business of tech’.”

Speaking Opportunity: The organizers of NAB Show are now accepting speaker submissions for the 2019 program, which will be held 6 – 11 April in Las Vegas. This is the larger NAB conference & expo (as opposed to NAB’s NYC show, which just wrapped), drawing more than 100k attendees to address the convergence of media, entertainment & technology. Topics of interest in 2019 include: Advanced Advertising; eSports & Game Development; AI/Machine Learning/Deep Learning; 5G; Connected Cars and the Passenger Economy; Content Creators & Creative Masters; Podcasting; Innovation Pipeline; Multicultural Media Strategies; Next-Gen Media Technologies; and The Content Cloud. The deadline to submit a speaker proposal is Friday, 30 November.

Lunchtime Learning: BSR™ is a global nonprofit organization that works with its network of more than 250 member companies and other partners to build a just and sustainable world. At this year’s BSR Conference which was held earlier this week in New York City, participants discussed “A New Blueprint for Business” and explored “what it takes to build a truly sustainable business that is resilient in the context of profound societal and environmental change.” Watch speakers from past BSR events to understand why “issues that have long been part of the remit of sustainability professionals are changing and becoming more and more central to business strategy.”

Coming Up Next Week: “Harnessing Tech for Responsible Growth” is a chief goal for many business leaders today; it’s also the theme of Techonomy18, which will run 11-13 November in Half Moon Bay. Questions posed by speakers at Techonomy this year include: Will software robots make work more creative? And, is universal cooperation a pipe dream? In Laguna Beach, WSJ’s flagship tech event D.LIVE gets underway on 12 November and features among its speaker lineup top executives from Uber, Google, Coinbase, and more. Senior technologist from CTOs on down attend SYS-CON’s Cloud Expo in New York (12-13 November) for a massive conversation around the technologies enabling digital transformation. Technology, Economy & Society are this year’s underlying themes. Infosecurity USA will be held 14-15 November in New York and draws over 4,000 security professionals for both inspiring talks and technical workshops. At Forbes CMO Summit (14-16 November; Dana Point) it’s all about this year’s theme “Champions of Change: CMOs at the Center of Business, Tech and Cultural Innovation” and the increasingly diverse hats chief marketers wear. Last but not least, the largest gathering of early childhood educators, administrators, and researchers – NAEYC Conference and Expo – begins 14 November in Washington DC.